1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a translation server, a translating method, and a program for providing an automatic translation service via a network and, more particularly, to a translation server, a translating method, and a program for providing a translation service of a high speed by using a translated sentence cache.
2. Description of the Related Arts
In recent years, owing to the spread of the Internet technique represented by World Wide Web (hereinafter, referred to as “WWW”) and E-mail, various kinds of information can be obtained without minding the national boundaries. Further, introduction of a network system into a company has widely been spread. Consequently, a case where a translation server having an automatic translating process which is advantageous in that client software is unnecessary and unitary management of dictionary maintenance can be made is introduced to the Intranet is increasing.
However, in the translation server arranged on a network such as Intranet or the like, if accesses are concentrated in a manner such that many translating requests are made to a specific homepage by the clients, an overload state such that a translating time becomes long often occurs. As a measure against such a load on the translation server, there are techniques such as parallelization of the translating process, caching by a proxy server, and the like. According to the parallelization of the translating process, even if the translating requests are concentrated, machine translation of Web pages obtained by simultaneously receiving a plurality of translating requests can be executed in parallel and the translating time can be reduced as compared with that in the case of a sequential process. However, also in the parallelization of the translating process, if an even larger number of translating requests are concentrated, it is difficult to cope with such a situation and there are limitations in the improvement of the translating time by the parallelization. The proxy server is an Internet server for controlling accesses by the clients to the Internet. By using the cache by the proxy server, the Web page which was accessed once as a request from the client is locally stored and, thereafter, the client obtains the Web page from the proxy server, thereby improving access performance. If a translation result of the translation server is stored as translated sentence cache data into the proxy server by using the cache by the proxy server as mentioned above, the translation server obtains the translation result from the proxy server in response to the translating request from the client and responds to the client, so that the translating time can be reduced. However, according to the machine translation in the translation server, although a translation dictionary of the user is properly updated in order to improve translation quality, in using the cache by the proxy server, even if the translation dictionary is updated by the translation server, the machine translation is not executed again with respect to the Web page of the translated sentence cache data which has already been stored in the proxy server. A problem such that the translation result by the updated translation dictionary cannot be obtained occurs.